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Simon Wiesenthal
Background Simon was born on December 31, 1908 in Ukraine. His father died in World War I, causing his mother to remarry. Simon graduated from the Gymnasium in 1928 and received a degree in architectural engineering at the Technical University of Prague. He married Cyla Mueller and life was good for a while until Russia and Germany signed the "non-aggression pact". Simon's stepfather was arrested by the Soviet Secret Police, his stepbrother was shot, and he was forced to close his business. With bribing, he was able to save his wife, his mother, and himself from deportation and execution but was still forced to work at a labor camp called Ostbahn. In early 1942, the Nazis decided upon the "Final Solution". Simon's mother was sent to a death camp in August of that year. By September, most of his and of his wife's relatives were dead; 98 members of both families had perished. He hoped that his wife's blond hair would let her pass off as an "Aryan" and made a deal with the Polish underground to give her false papers. She lived in Warsaw for two years and then became a laborer in Rhineland, but her true identity was never found. Simon escaped the Ostbahn camp in October 1943, before inmates were liquidated. Unfortunately, he was recaptured and put in Mauthausen. He was barely alive when the camp was liberated on May 5, 1945. He reunited with his wife in 1945 and their daughter, Pauline, is born in 1946. As a Nazi Hunter After his health was completely restored, he set out to gather evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army. His evidence was used in war crime trials. After he ended his association with the United States in 1947, he created the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz Austria for the purpose of finding more evidence. However, as the U.S. and Soviet became more indulged in the Cold War, interest in persecuting the Nazis was lost. The Center was closed and gave away all its files except for one: the one about Adolf Eichmann, who has implemented the "Final Solution". Simon never gave up on finding Eichmann, finding pieces of evidence here and there about his location until he was found in Buenos Aires. Israelis captured him and brought him to a trial, where he was found guilty of mass murder and was executed on May 31, 1961. Encouraged by this success, Simon reopened the Center in Vienna. Some of the war criminals he found includes Karl Silberbauer and nine SS officers. "According to Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine (February 2, 1964), Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?,’ there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler,’ Another will say, ‘I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes,’ Another will say, ‘I built houses,’ But I will say, ‘I did not forget you’."" (Simon Wiesenthal Center).